Poliquin: Dick Easterly is headed to the Hall of Fame with, perhaps, ol' Ben Schwartzwalder on his mind

Syracuse, N.Y. -- It’s been a bit more than a half-century since he answered Ben Schwaltzwalder’s key question, and all this time later Dick Easterly still can’t believe the brass it took for him to respond to the great man on that afternoon up on the big campus in town.

There was Easterly, all 5-foot-9 and 168 pounds of him, fresh out of North High School and looking for an option beyond a hitch with the U.S. Marines. And there was Schwartzwalder, the former paratrooper who was talking to the kid only as a favor for the friend of a friend of the kid’s dad.

“So,” Easterly recalled the other day, “Ben asks me, ‘What do you play?’ And I say, ‘Quarterback.’ And he asks, ‘Can you run?’ And I say, ‘Yeah, I’m a pretty good runner.’ And he asks, ‘Do you play defense?’ And I say, ‘Yeah, I’m probably better at that than anything.’

“And then Ben asks, ‘OK, how many touchdown passes did you throw?’ And I say, ‘Well, um . . . Coach, I’ve never thrown a pass.’ And I hadn’t. We didn’t throw the ball at North. Can you imagine the unmitigated gall it took for me to walk up to Ben Schwartzwalder and tell him I could play quarterback for him at Syracuse University even though I’d never thrown a pass?”

Turns out it didn’t matter all that much to Schwartzwalder, a tough bird who’d fought at Normandy, saluted fellow military veterans and knew that the skinny fella in front of him, the one born and raised on our north side, was otherwise prepared to enlist in the Marines.

So he told Easterly that if he was smart enough to pass the SU entrance examination and actually get into the school, and if had the corresponding gumption to walk onto the football team without benefit of a scholarship, a uniform would be waiting for him.

Done and done.

“And you know something?” Easterly offered during a telephone conversation. “Nothing really changed right away because I never did throw a pass until I made the varsity at SU.”

That would have been in 1959 when he served as the “alternate” quarterback to Dave Sarette in that magical season during which the Orangemen went 11-0 and won the national championship.

That would have been in 1959 when he completed 21 of his 39 tosses for 353 yards and seven touchdowns (when not rushing 40 times for 143 yards and another TD . . . and when not playing in the defensive backfield . . . and when not returning punts).

That would have been in 1959 when he began the great push that would finally land him, fully 52 years later, in the Greater Syracuse Sports Hall of Fame.

“Boy, there are some great people in that Hall,” said Easterly, a member of a starry group of eight who will be inducted a week from tonight at Drumlins Country Club. “All those Syracuse Nats. All those athletes. All those coaches. There are All-Americans. There are All-Pros. It’s unbelievable. I don’t know what I’m doing in there with them.”

Here are a few hints:

-- He started for three years for Schwartzwalder-coached Orange clubs that went 26-5, ending his SU career by being named the Most Valuable Player of the 1961 Liberty Bowl.

-- He started for three years as the center fielder on the Syracuse baseball team, including the ’61 edition that went to the College World Series in Omaha.

-- He started for three years (after having been drafted in the 14th round of the ’62 NFL Draft by the San Francisco 49ers) for the CFL’s Hamilton Tiger-Cats and helped them to win the 1963 Grey Cup.

And still . . .

“To be honored by your hometown is just so special, so humbling,” said Easterly, who is 73 and makes his home these days in Tampa where he’ll watch, in the flesh, his alma mater play South Florida later this month. “I was just lucky. If you notice, a lot of the teams I was on were great teams. The credit really belongs to the guys I played with and to the coaches. I was blessed with some ability that helped, but if you find yourself surrounded by good people, you usually come out pretty successfully. Not always. But usually.”

He’ll be enshrined along with golf’s Sally Dee; Pat Donnelly, the Bishop Ludden basketball coach; baseball’s John Johnstone; Bob Kallfelz, the former St. John the Evangelist basketball sensation; lacrosse’s Brad Kotz; Beezie Madden, the three-time Olympic equestrian and two-time gold-medal winner; and Royce Newell, who played basketball at SU before embarking on a life dedicated to teaching, coaching and athletic administration.

And, no, Easterly, who will be joined at Monday’s induction dinner by some 20 members of his family, wouldn’t miss the big doings for the world. You know, even if does mean leaving his fairly beloved Florida (if only for a while) and flying north.

“I’ve been In Tampa since 1989,” Easterly said. “It took me a while, but I finally realized they don’t have snow down here. One good thing about playing for Ben was that you didn’t have to think too much.”

Apparently, you didn’t have to throw a football, either. That is, until it mattered.

(Bud Poliquin's columns, "To The Point" observations and "Morning Orange" reports appear virtually every day on syracuse.com. His work can also be regularly found on the pages of The Post-Standard newspaper. Additionally, Poliquin can be heard weekday mornings between 10 a.m.-12 noon on the sports-talk radio show, "Bud & The Manchild," on The Score 1260-AM.)